Реферат: Development Of Computers And Technology Essay Research

Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University.

During the late ?30’s, Atanasoff had spent time trying to build an

electronic calculating device to help his students solve complicated math

problems. One night, the idea came to him for linking the computer memory and

the associated logic. Later, he and an associate, Clifford Berry, succeeded in

building the ?ABC,” for Atanasoff-Berry Computer. After Mauchly met with

Atanasoff and Berry, he used the ABC as the basis for the next computer

development. From this association ultimately would come a lawsuit, considering

attempts to get patents for a commercial version of the machine that Mauchly

built. The suit was finally decided in 1974, when it was decided that Atanasoff

had been the true developer of the ideas required to make an electronic digital

computer actually work, although some computer historians dispute this decision.

But during the war years, Mauchly and Eckert were able to use the ABC principals

in dramatic effect to create the ENIAC.

Computers Become More Powerful

The size of ENIAC’s numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could

multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value

of each product from a Multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was

about 1000 times faster than the previous generation of computers. ENIAC used

18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about

180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card input, 1 multiplier, 1

divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served

as adders and also as quick-access (.0002 seconds) read-write register storage.

The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate

“units” of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a “route” for the flow of

information. The problem with the ENIAC was that the average life of a vacuum

tube is 3000 hours, and a vacuum tube would then burn out once every 15 minutes.

It would take on average 15 minutes to find the burnt out tube and replace it.

Enthralled by the success of ENIAC, the mathematician John Von Neumann